Engineers Engineer blueprint breakdown.

Mephane

Mephane
Using this list as my source. Correct me if that one is inaccurate, but I have no reason to doubt this information so far. I am looking specifically at the grade 5 modifications, as these are the ultimate goals; it matters relatively little where you get your first grade 1 mod when that is going to be overwritten anyway.

(Click the image to get to the source.)
Edit: And here is an image I found which shows which engineer leads to the next one. Sorry for not linking to the source, I only bookmarked the raw image link some days ago:
FGVW1ok.jpg

So you can get grade 5 multi-cannons (up to +100% on a really good roll) from one of the tier 1 engineers which you can unlock the very first day of playing. Yet for lasers there even only exist grades 2, 3 and 4 for beam, burst and pulse respectively. FSD is rather early available with Farseer, but Thrusters come latest with Palin, which also is one of the most annoying to unlock, and who is an engineer with exploration in mind, yet has the most crucial upgrade for any combat ship (you don't need clean or dirty drive tuning when exploring out there, but in combat the difference between these mods and stock thrusters can mean life and death).

There are many more inconsistencies and arbitry dead ends (plasma accelerator, max is grade 2?), but one question that especially lingers in my mind:

Will the missing upgrade be added, or are these we see know the ultimate maximum? Making a grade 4 modification is not that much easier than a grade 5 one, yet spending tens of hours making grade 4 mods only for FD to then later add the grade 5 version afterward would not go down well with lots of people.

As for me, I am out. I am not spending my time on this any longer when I don't know whether lasers are not meant to be 2nd class citizens to multi-cannons, or whether I would waste my time making non-grade-5 laser mods when these may not even be the highest ones - all while the unlock requirements as well as material acquisition is riddled with awkwardness at every corner, railroady gameplay and probably a dozen bugs (just read Polonium may not even spawn at the moment) to boot.
 
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h347h

h347h
Mephane said:
Using this list as my source. Correct me if that one is inaccurate, but I have no reason to doubt this information so far. I am looking specifically at the grade 5 modifications, as these are the ultimate goals; it matters relatively little where you get your first grade 1 mod when that is going to be overwritten anyway.

(Click the image to get to the source.)
http://i.imgur.com/iBFeZbC.png

So you can get grade 5 multi-cannons (up to +100% on a really good roll) from one of the tier 1 engineers which you can unlock the very first day of playing. Yet for lasers there even only exist grades 2, 3 and 4 for beam, burst and pulse respectively. FSD is rather early available with Farseer, but Thrusters come latest with Palin, which also is one of the most annoying to unlock, and who is an engineer with exploration in mind, yet has the most crucial upgrade for any combat ship (you don't need clean or dirty drive tuning when exploring out there, but in combat the difference between these mods and stock thrusters can mean life and death).

There are many more inconsistencies and arbitry dead ends (plasma accelerator, max is grade 2?), but one question that especially lingers in my mind:

Will the missing upgrade be added, or are these we see know the ultimate maximum? Making a grade 4 modification is not that much easier than a grade 5 one, yet spending tens of hours making grade 4 mods only for FD to then later add the grade 5 version afterward would not go down well with lots of people.

As for me, I am out. I am not spending my time on this any longer when I don't know whether lasers are not meant to be 2nd class citizens to multi-cannons, or whether I would waste my time making non-grade-5 laser mods when these may not even be the highest ones - all while the unlock requirements as well as material acquisition is riddled with awkwardness at every corner, railroady gameplay and probably a dozen bugs (just read Polonium may not even spawn at the moment) to boot.
Click to expand...
Supposedly there are 30 engineers? I don't know if that is true or not. I am actually holding off on committing fully into weapon modding until the favor system drops as like you say somethings just seem a bit off for now.
 

Mephane

Mephane
h347h said:
Supposedly there are 30 engineers? I don't know if that is true or not. I am actually holding off on committing fully into weapon modding until the favor system drops as like you say somethings just seem a bit off for now.
Click to expand...

Assuming there are 15 more - we haven't heard from any of those. If they do exist, they must be ridiculously hard to find because by now someone must have come upon at least one of them. And the 15 we know about are already such a massive PITA to unlock and rank up (not even counting the actual upgrade lottery that comes afterward), how much worse would the 15 other engineers then be?
 

Derath

D
Theres only T2 beams actually Mephane, 3 bursts and 4 pulses.

I found the engineers that don't do a rank 5 frustrating personally, especially broo I spent a good chunk of time unlocking him to find he barely does better than the dweller :p they will be adding more I suspect but there are only 15 for now, i'm fairly certain the rest aren't in game somebody would have datamined the pictures or some info about them and I've got broo at 5 and he hasn't sent me another invite. I've been a pretty versatile player so unless it has a very high exploration requirement for the invite to pop up I probably would have got it if its in game.
 
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Thetele

T
My current plan is to unlock all engineers that don't need 50 and + rare commodities to unlock. Then if they haven't done changes by then i will be out until 2.2. No point to spend time if the system is going to get changed, new higher stuff added. Current system is too grind for me.

I want frontier come out and say how long (play time) they think it should take in average for players to get engineer modifications for every engineer and every tier. 1?4?10?100? how many hours?
 

Mephane

Mephane
Thetele said:
My current plan is to unlock all engineers that don't need 50 and + rare commodities to unlock. Then if they haven't done changes by then i will be out until 2.2. No point to spend time if the system is going to get changed, new higher stuff added. Current system is too grind for me.

I want frontier come out and say how long (play time) they think it should take in average for players to get engineer modifications for every engineer and every tier. 1?4?10?100? how many hours?
Click to expand...

I don't know about their expectations, but to even upgrade a single ship to full grade 5, I can easily claim it will be way more than 100 hours. Ships afterward would go faster because you don't have to unlock the engineers again (yikes, now I have given Sandro an idea to make this even more "cool" and "awesome").
 

Derath

D
Mephane said:
I don't know about their expectations, but to even upgrade a single ship to full grade 5, I can easily claim it will be way more than 100 hours. Ships afterward would go faster because you don't have to unlock the engineers again (yikes, now I have given Sandro an idea to make this even more "cool" and "awesome").
Click to expand...

I think material drop chance grief aside the time it takes isn't a problem, I just have a real issue with stepping-stone engineers that only exist to pass you on to another engineer that knows what they are doing. If they wanted to do things that way they really should have had no rank 5's in the first set, the lower rank engineers should level up faster but lead to the more experienced ones. It gets users used to the way the system works, gives access to mods fairly early and prevents the unlocking of an engineer whose only purpose is to give you an invite :p
 

Mephane

Mephane
I am right now wondering how FD intended this for someone who doesn't peruse the forums, Reddit, Inara etc. How many players are grinding their behinds off as we speak, fueled by the hope for the best upgrades for their ship, only to never find an engineer in the game that makes, for example, grade 5 plasma accelerator mods?

Just like the RNG upgrading process itself, the end then is not met because one as reached their goal, but because eventually one simply has to give up.
 

bad-r0bot

bad-r0bot
I made the second image for Qohen's engineer database :D source

I really want an efficient weapon mod for the beam laser because none of the mods are any good for my FDL. Light weight mount reduces integrity which, when my shields go down, is crucial vs malfunction. Long range increases distributor draw, mass, power, and reduces my damage. Short range, while initially a good idea, will ultimately force close combat vs NPCs that really like to go 2-3km out for a joust. And sturdy mount is immediately eliminated with the increase in mass. At this point in time, you're going to have to rely on secondary effects.

5 or 6 new engineers have been named but not unlocked yet so far. Let's hope they aren't too insane too unlock and maybe have something for beam lasers.
 
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